A Scene Right Out of Philip Roth: His Books Come Home to Newark’s Library

Philip Roth revisiting areas where he grew up in Newark.Credit
Bob Peterson/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

NEWARK — In Philip Roth’s novella “Goodbye, Columbus,” the Newark Public Library is where Neil Klugman spends a summer working with a colleague whose “breath smells of hair oil and hair oil of breath” and mooning over the rich and sexy Brenda Patimkin. In real life, Mr. Roth has designated the library, which he has called his home away from home, as the repository for his own book collection, a bequest that will be announced here on Thursday evening at the inaugural Philip Roth Lecture, to be delivered by Zadie Smith.

The series is a sort of thank-you on the part of the library’s trustees, who see the gift of his books as a fortunate, transforming windfall and intend to house it in a special room designed by the architect Henry Myerberg. “It really sparked a renaissance here at the library,” Rosemary Steinbaum, a trustee, said recently, explaining that the board planned to start a capital campaign not just to pay for the Roth room but also to refurbish the whole place. “We think the Newark Public Library can now become an important literary destination for students and scholars and even for tourists.”

Mr. Roth’s library, some 4,000 volumes, is now stored mostly at his house in northwest Connecticut, where it has more or less taken over the premises. A room at the back of the house has been given over to nonfiction. It has library shelves, library lighting — everything except a librarian, Mr. Roth said recently on the phone from his New York apartment. Fiction starts in the living room, takes up all the walls in a front study, and has also colonized a guest bedroom upstairs. Copies of Mr. Roth’s own books and their many translations are stuffed in closets and piled in the attic. The books that were helpful to Mr. Roth in his research for his novel “The Plot Against America” are all grouped together, as are those he consulted for “Operation Shylock.”

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Henry Myerberg’s design for the Philip Roth collection of books at the Newark Public Library.

The books will be shelved in Newark exactly as they are in Connecticut — not a window into Mr. Roth’s mind exactly, but physical evidence of the eclectic writers who helped shape it: Salinger, Bellow, Malamud, Kafka, Bruno Schulz. Many of the volumes are heavily underlined and annotated. “It’s like he’s having a dialogue with them,” Ms. Steinbaum said.

“I’m 83, and I don’t have any heirs,” Mr. Roth said, explaining why he decided to give the library away. “If I had children it might be a different story. It’s not a huge library, but it’s special to me, and I wanted it preserved as it was, if only for historical interest: What was an American writer reading in the second half of the 20th century.”

He chose Newark, he added, because like a lot of people of his generation, especially those who had attended Weequahic High School, he retained a singular attachment to his old hometown. “It may also be true of people who grew up in Cleveland or Detroit,” he said. “I don’t know. I do know that kids who graduated between when Weequahic opened in the ’30s and the great population shift that occurred in the 1960s remain very devoted to their memories and to the school.”

Mr. Roth is also devoted to the Newark Public Library, though strictly speaking it was not the library of his childhood. That was the branch on Osborne Terrace, about a mile from his home, where his first bookish love was the baseball novels of John Tunis. Starting in high school, when his literary hero had become Thomas Wolfe, he began to visit the main library downtown, and in 1950, when he was a student at what was then called Newark Rutgers, the main library became his other home. “I’d have a class at 11:30, say, and another at 2, and the library was where I spent those off-hours,” he recalled. “I was always in the reference room. I haunted it. And the other wonderful thing about the Newark Public Library was the open stacks. You could just roam through them and sit down in the aisle and pick through the books.”

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Philip Roth in 2013.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

He spent so much time there, Mr. Roth added, that it seemed like the right place for his alter ego Neil Klugman, though unlike Neil, he wasn’t actually employed by the library. “That’s why so many of the details are wrong,” he said laughing. (Some nitpicky readers have noticed that in “Goodbye, Columbus,” the Newark Public Library has, guarding its door, a pair of stone lions that appear to have been purloined from the more famous public library in New York.)

The Newark Public Library, one of the first grand civic buildings in the city, was finished in 1901, and like a lot of libraries built back then it aspired to be an Italian palazzo. A wide marble staircase Neil admired is gone now, but the soaring, four-story atrium with a stained-glass skylight remains. A visitor today can’t help feeling a sort of embarrassed wistfulness for a time when people built such monuments for their books. Ms. Smith, who was Mr. Roth’s idea, will speak in what used to be the main reading room, an upstairs space with 22-foot ceilings and limestone fireplaces at either end. (Subsequent lecturers, Mr. Roth said, will be chosen by a committee he has appointed.)

What will become the Roth library is next door, now a dusty, double-height upstairs room used for storage. According to Mr. Myerberg’s plan, the air-conditioning ducts will have to go, as will an ugly dropped ceiling of acoustic tile. Lined with shelves, with an open balcony at one end, the room will look more modern than palazzolike, more in keeping with Mr. Roth’s aesthetic. “It’s not meant to be a museum,” Mr. Myerberg said. “I see it as a busy, alive place where you could have meetings and writing classes.”

Mr. Roth said that he liked the design the moment he saw it, and added: “I’m glad that my books are all going to be together. I don’t know why. I’m not going to be together, but let them be together.”

Correction: October 27, 2016

Because of an editing error, an article on Wednesday about Philip Roth’s decision to leave his book collection to the Newark Public Library misspelled the surname of the protagonist of Mr. Roth’s novella “Goodbye, Columbus” at one point. As the article correctly noted elsewhere, he is Neil Klugman, not Krugman. And the article misstated the height of the library’s atrium. It is four stories high, not two.

A version of this article appears in print on October 26, 2016, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Philip Roth’s Books Coming Home to Newark. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe